The OA's Jason Isaacs Is Just as Bewildered by the Netflix Series as You Are

"Wait, let me interview you for a second—what did you think?" Jason Isaacs is understandably eager to gauge my reaction to The OA, his little-publicized surprise Netflix drama, which premiered last Friday and seems purpose-built to defy consensus. Following a young woman, Prairie (Brit Marling), who mysteriously returns home seven years after she disappeared, the show's blend of psychological riddles and supernatural flights of fancy has infuriated as many critics as it's enchanted.

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Introduced in the second episode, Isaacs plays Dr. Hunter Hap, a scientist whose pioneering research into near-death experiences drives him to villainous extremes, and plays a key role in Prairie's disappearance. Isaacs told Esquire.com about his renewed sense of bewilderment after watching the finished episodes, The OA's "non-marketing campaign," and why Hap is, despite the cruelty of his mad scientist methods, the opposite of heartless.

ESQ: The OA shifts so rapidly between genres that it's almost impossible to categorize. What struck you most as you were reading the scripts?

Jason Isaacs: I've never read anything like it. I thought it took such enormous creative risks, and just asks the audience to boldly go. There are so many things that I find hard to describe about it, because as you say, it's impossible to place as you're watching it, and you're not sure from one episode to the next what you just saw, and why it happened, and whether it really happened.

I was up at midnight when I got the script, and I'm normally an insomniac but I was about to go to sleep on this night. I asked if I could just read it in the morning, and they said no, because you have to Skype the director at two o'clock in the morning, and then if you like it you have to get on a plane and go straight to New York to start filming. So my mind was kind of spinning as I read it—it seemed almost inconceivable to me that they were making something as risky as this.

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So you got on that plane?

Yeah, I flew to New York, I got off the plane, I had a costume fitting and went almost straight to Grand Central Station to shoot my first scene with Brit. I met her, really, as Prairie. So when I watched the show for the first time last week, I saw the other side of the story [with the boys], which I'd had no experience of. I hadn't been there when they shot it, I hadn't met anybody involved, and so at that point I suddenly started to question whether everything that I'd been shooting had really happened. While I was doing it, I felt that [Hap and Prairie's] was the real story, but when I saw the show for the first time, everything started to shift like a magic eye painting. Now I'm not sure I know anything!

I hadn't been there when they shot it, I hadn't met anybody involved, and so at that point I suddenly started to question whether everything that I'd been shooting had really happened.

The lack of publicity for The OA is a fairly unusual move–the first trailer was released barely a week before the actual show. Did you know that would be the approach?

Well, one of the things that I regret so much about many of the projects that I've been in is that you end up talking about them so much, online and on the radio and on television, that by the time people buy a ticket or switch on the show, they already know the story. If somebody tells you a punchline before a joke, you're not going to enjoy the joke very much.

I find one of the best places to see films is at film festivals, because if I find myself with a couple of hours to spare, I can walk into something that I have no idea what it's about, who's in it, who made it, what genre it sits in. It's like sitting around a fire and somebody telling you a story, you don't know where it's going to go, and that's most of the power of storytelling–being led places unexpectedly. If there was ever a show for which a non-marketing campaign is designed, it's The OA. People should come to it absolutely blank.

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Netflix

When I asked Brit about the challenges of playing blindness, she said that she thought it was equally challenging for her scene partners like you, because you can't make eye contact.

That's very generous of her, and very typical of her. I think it should be said that acting is a very easy job—I'm sure some of my colleagues will hate me for that, but all you have to do is imagine yourself in a given situation, and anything that helps you to do that makes it easier. If the person opposite you seems to be the person that they're playing, and seems to think and feel and want the things that their character wants, then acting is almost effortless, and when someone says "cut" you have no idea what just happened. Brit is so spectacularly focused and playing so many layers, and she didn't break that when they called "cut". She didn't stay in character, but neither did she socialize and pal around on set—she stayed in the corner, and stayed terribly focused. So it's easy, acting opposite her, and the fact that she can't look at you means that you can look at her in all kinds of ways.

Right, because Hap's feelings for Prairie are complicated…

I don't think it's giving too much away to say that [he's] obsessed with her, and possibly in love with her–that's probably true of almost every character in the show. And in a way, that's easier to do when she's not looking back at you than when she is.

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Hap is the antagonist, but he initially seems like a Good Samaritan figure, and there's a philanthropic core to what he's trying to achieve. You've played a lot of villains in your career, so where does he fall on the spectrum?

Well, at the risk of inevitably sounding pretentious, I've never played a villain. I don't take the job unless I can find a way to make the man human, and to justify it. As far as Hap's concerned, scientifically, the ends absolutely justify the means because the ends are so glorious and so profound. It's impossible to achieve the kind of scientific breakthrough he's looking for without some pain along the way. And he feels the cost of that profoundly, he's not a man who's indifferent to it at all. But he's had to develop an attitude, in order to do the work, that looks Machiavellian at first glance. He looks heartless, but the opposite is true, which is why I was dying to play him.

In Harry Potter, Lucius Malfoy is a racist aristocrat. He's a man looking backwards thinking there was a time when things were great, there was a time when he had more status, and he's scared of the future. His belief in pure blood, his insecurity, his fear for his own irrelevance in the future, is something that we don't need to look too far to find in the modern world. It's getting people elected even as we speak! My character in The Patriot is a man trying to win the war, and in that particular war there were a bunch of second sons who were raised as aristocrats, but potentially were penniless, and only by winning the war were they going to claim any status for themselves in the new land. It's not that I endorse what they do, but there has to be a rationale, and it has to be a kind of evil that feels human to an audience. I try to take parts that make my job easy for me because they're believable, and I believe Hap absolutely.

You starred in Awake, a show that was cancelled before its time on network television. The landscape has changed so much even since then [2012], so how did the Netflix experience compare?

If Awake were on Netflix, I think it would still be on. There's an absolutely justifiable need for networks to deliver certain numbers to the people who are buying the advertising space, to fill your hour-long drama with ad breaks. And Netflix doesn't do that, which means they can tell stories in a very different way. Network television isn't necessarily worse or better, it's just different–you need to have five big act-break hooks, for people going into commercials so that they'll come back afterwards, and that structural necessity is a fucking nightmare for writers. It's not an organic way of telling stories.

Because of that structure, network television requires that you repeat things all the time, repeat information if possible, because people are coming back after the ad break, or they're maybe tuning in halfway through the show. On a streaming network, there's a very different assumption about the kinds of people who are watching it, and how they're watching it. People are bingeing it, so you don't want to get boring or repeat yourself, you don't need to repeat information because they saw last week's half an hour ago. There is a certain joy in assuming that the audience is slightly more with you on the journey.

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